The faked & baked

Nepalipan (Nepaliness)…

We are excellent in faking things up in terms of expressing our true desires, identity and feelings for our relationship with fellow human beings. We are best at even faking up ourselves to be something that we are not.

People always seem to underestimate themselves and try to project as something they are not. Women’s activists always try to equate women as men; they undermine their own feminine beauty, tolerance, and inner strength that make them far more powerful than men. The rich always tries to project themselves as poor because they are not sure of the source of their affluence. The poor always tries to show off. A brahmin ( supposedly supreme cast in Nepal) try to project himself as chhetriya (supposedly a warrior class) and chhetriya always try to project themselves as thakuri, or ranas (supposedly the royal class). Newar, a Nepali community, which represents Nepal’s most valued cultural and artistic heritage occasionally fake themselves as other community instead of taking pride in their own.

People do not even have faith and devotion in their own professions and tend to project themselves as something else. For example, medical doctors or engineers always appear to have a secret passion to be politicians or CEOs, instead of updating the knowledge and technology in their own profession. Students in Nepal do not act like students; they are politicians in disguise who are ready to demonstrate on the streets with slightest provocation. Lawyers and judges do not content themselves working within their legal boundaries; they secretly aspire for political power and popularity than to be professionally correct. Instead of investigating and reporting the truth, the press in Nepal has been overly political in their reporting; they have lost faith in their own professional method to prove their points and have resorted to frequent to violent demonstrations on the streets.

People do not believe in neutral relationship; they try to define every relationship they have in few familiar categories. So it has become common in our society to address every young woman as “bahini” (sister), and every man as “dai “(brother), as it is also common for these “bahinis and dais” to get into sexual relationship and get into matrimonial relationship. There are uncountable numbers of cases where such fake brothers have married their fake sisters later. So if you heard a girl say to a boy “Dai, aja mero ko ma aunos na, hai? (Brother, come to my place today, will you?), you may not be listening to a conversation between a brother and a sister. This may be a conversation between lovers, trying to seduce each other. Some of such couples go to such extend of formalizing their brotherly and sisterly relationship only to be broken later with sexual relationship or marriage. In fact, in Nepal, it is common for any female to address any of her male acquaintance to address as dai, bhai (brother), uncle, and for any males to address his acquaintance as bahini, didi (sister), aunty, and likes. Anybody who appears in late forty are automatically addressed as baa, aama, (father mother), and even as baje, bajai (grandfather, grandmother) if they appear above sixty years of age.

Children are taught to address their parent’s friends as uncles and aunties. Friends’ children automatically address each other as dada and didi (brother and sisters) because people believe they should give a name to every relationship. Students in Nepali schools are taught to address all their fellow students as dai, didi and bahini.

In the presence of such pretentious culture, it is hard to expect honesty and openness to foster. We must learn to be ourselves, express our real thoughts and feelings, and to develop an honest relationship rather than faking everything up to meet political, cultural and social interest.